Tea Party Celebrates Fifth Anniversary

“I think after the 2012 election the Tea Party is really finding its own identity,” said Judd Saul, a filmmaker from Cedar Falls, Iowa, who was there to promote his new film about the Internal Revenue Service, “Unfair.”

“The Tea Party will be coming back with a vengeance,” he added. “But we’re still in the rebuilding phase.”

The Tea Party is both the Republican Party’s greatest agitator and its biggest source of political energy, and that has proved difficult to square since the 2010 elections sent to Washington the first freshman class of lawmakers it inspired. With the midterm races this year and the 2016 presidential elections on the horizon, the biggest question for the few hundred people who traveled from all over the country to celebrate on Thursday was how to ensure that internal divisions will not consume them.

Apparently nothing has changed. Here's something from the wiki entry attributed to Mr. James M. McPherson:

Immigration during the first five years of the 1850s reached a level five times greater than a decade earlier. Most of the new arrivals were poor Catholic peasants or laborers from Ireland and Germany who crowded into the tenements of large cities. Crime and welfare costs soared. Cincinnati's crime rate, for example, tripled between 1846 and 1853 and its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston's expenditures for poor relief rose threefold during the same period.

Just change a few words and you end up with the talking points of the GOP/conservatives/Tea Party for any minority group they feel like picking on like blacks, latinos, etc.